Authors: Donna Andrews
“Not much here,” one of the voices said after a moment.
“He’s not stupid enough to leave anything important lying out in the open,” said another voice. A familiar voice—one of our rival burglars was Leonard Fisher.
“No, sir.”
“Do a thorough search,” Fisher ordered. “And bring me any papers you find so I can check them out.”
“Yes, sir.” Two voices, in almost perfect unison.
“Stuffy in here, sir,” one voice said after a moment. “Shall we open the curtains?”
Caroline shifted slightly. I hoped she was preparing to come out fighting, not to go over the railing.
“Just turn up the AC,” Fisher said. “I don’t want to take any chance of being spotted.”
“Yes, sir.”
A few seconds later, I heard the hum and rattle of the HVAC unit kicking in. I breathed a small sigh of relief. Not that we’d benefit from the cold air, since we were outside in the broiling sun with the curtain between us and the AC, but at least the noise of the compressor would camouflage any small sounds Caroline and I made.
If only we could camouflage ourselves from possible onlookers outside. Luckily, the Annex was the only part of the hotel with windows overlooking the loading dock area, and the occupants of those rooms would have to step onto their ledges to see us. But the golfers would have a great view, if any of them happened to look this way. Or anyone who made a delivery to the hotel. Even a staff member coming out on the loading dock to smoke, as a discreetly placed ash tray suggested some did. To anyone who bothered to look up instead of straight ahead, we were about as unobtrusive as a black cat on a snow-covered roof.
But since there was nothing I could do to make us any less visible, I focused my attention back to what was going on in the room.
“If anyone spots us, pretend to be washing the windows,” Caroline hissed.
I realized that if I leaned as far as I could to the left, I could get one eye next to the place where the two sides of the curtains came together. I could only see a small fraction of the room, but since that fraction included the desk, on which we’d left the papers and the laptop lying, it was potentially an interesting fraction.
Leonard Fisher was sitting at the desk, leafing slowly through the papers I’d photographed. I caught an occasional glimpse of an arm or a leg clad in dark blue with red trim. From those glimpses, and from the sounds we were hearing, I deduced that uniformed Flying Monkeys were doing a rapid and thorough search of the room—and probably being a lot less careful than Caroline and I had been to avoid leaving any signs of our presence. Meanwhile, Fisher had booted the laptop and discovered the password screen. He made a few unsuccessful attempts to log in before frowning, muttering something under his breath, and turning the machine off again.
Caroline and I had a bad moment when one of the guards came over and searched the folds of the curtains. I jerked my head back from the opening. Caroline actually tucked her head down and under one arm, in a fair imitation of a sleeping bird, as if she could prevent him from seeing her if she didn’t see him.
Luckily, the guard was so focused on the curtains that he never looked out. And also luckily, he left the curtains very much as he had found them, so there was still a tiny gap for me to peek through when he moved off again.
A few minutes later the guards had finished their search.
“Nothing, sir.” One of them came to stand at Fisher’s elbow, rather like a dog coming to heel.
“Take that.” Fisher pointed to the laptop. I saw Caroline stir slightly. For a moment, I was worried that she’d leap out from behind the curtains to wrestle the guard for the laptop. I reached over and patted her shoulder a couple of times. She became still again, but I could tell from the tension in her shoulder that she didn’t like it.
“Wait for me down at the car,” Fisher said.
“Yes, sir,” the two voices said in unison.
The room door opened and closed again. Fisher glanced over, as if to make sure the guards were on the other side of it. Then he pulled out his cell phone and punched some buttons.
“It’s me,” he said. “No luck.”
Evidently whoever was on the other side of the call had a lot to say in response, and was saying it rather loudly. Fisher moved the phone ever so slightly farther away from his ear and waited, staring at the botanical print above the desk.
“I realize that,” he finally said. “But I can’t find it if it’s not here to be found. And if you want my guess, I don’t think he has it.”
More listening.
“Absolutely,” Fisher said. “It’s the only reason I can see for that whole crazy stunt.”
I found myself wishing Fisher would find some reason to put his phone on speaker. I had a feeling I could learn a lot if I heard both sides of this conversation.
“No.” Fisher was starting to sound annoyed. “It’s the only copy.… Well, it is now.… No, like I keep telling you, a photocopy’s useless. Same thing for a scan. Too easy to forge. If both sides show up with a photocopy, it’s a he said/she said thing, and we can win that. They show up with the original and we’re sunk.”
Caroline poked me, and pointed at the crack in the curtain. Did she think I wasn’t already listening to every word?
“That’s what I’m trying to do,” Fisher said. “I’ll fill you in later.”
He punched a button or two and then stuck the phone in his pocket as if glad to be rid of it.
He looked around, frowning, as if dissatisfied with his surroundings. Was he doubting the thoroughness of the guards’ search? Had he only just noticed that they’d not only searched but trashed the room? I’d assumed either that they didn’t care who knew the room was searched or that they were hoping to leave a message for Denton.
Suddenly he strode over to the window. Caroline and I drew back and quailed in our separate corners of the ledge.
“No wonder this place is such an oven,” he muttered. I heard him slide the glass door closed and then latch it.
“Great,” I muttered. “Now we’re really stuck.”
Chapter 27
“Sssh!” Caroline hissed.
“If we keep it quiet, he can’t hear us with the window closed,” I whispered. I was peering into the room again. “And it’s okay. He’s gone now.”
“It’s not okay,” Caroline said. “I’m stuck here on this wretched little balcony with my bum hanging over the railing, clinging for dear life to a geranium plant.”
“They’re petunias,” I said.
“Whatever. I’m not a botanist. How are you going to get me down from here?”
“I have my cell phone,” I said. “Do you have Ekaterina’s number?”
Of course, it took rather a lot of careful wriggling to extricate my cell phone from my pocket without knocking myself off the balcony. And after all that, Ekaterina’s phone rang on unanswered.
“She probably turns it off when she’s working,” I said.
“She could put the damned thing on vibrate!”
“Maybe she has and will call us back as soon as she can,” I said, in my most soothing tone.
“As soon as she can may be too late,” Caroline said. “I’m not sure how much longer I can hang on.”
I took a closer look and realized that she wasn’t exaggerating. I’d managed to wedge myself between the rail and the side of the hotel, but even so my perch felt precarious. Caroline was perched on the rail and wobbled alarmingly. To keep from falling, she had to hold on to the rail and the petunia pot, which meant she was supporting a lot of her weight with her arms—and she didn’t have the same upper body strength that my blacksmithing gave me.
I had to do something.
If I’d had any kind of metal tool, I might have tried breaking the window, but the closest thing I had to a hard object was my phone, and I didn’t think it would survive an abrupt encounter with triple-paned glass. I glanced down. If I could crawl over the railing and dangle from it as far down as possible before letting go, I would probably survive the fall. I might not even break anything if I relaxed.
At least that was what Rob would tell me. He was a total klutz but claimed he’d never broken a bone in any of his mishaps. According to him, the key was to retrain yourself so when you realized you were falling, your reaction was not “Oh no! I’m falling! I’ll break every bone in my body!” but “Hey, cool, I seem to be falling again.”
But so far, my attempts to retrain myself had not been successful, and I suspected that the most important factor in falling safely was having a laid-back temperament. I’d never qualify.
Think positively, I told myself.
“Where do you have the key card?” I asked Caroline.
“In my right pocket,” she said. “But I don’t dare let go to fish it out.”
At least it was in the pocket on my side. I managed to lean over and fish out the room key card. I also snagged her cell phone and put it on the dirt in the geranium pot, where she might have a chance of reaching it if she needed it. Then I began carefully climbing over the rail.
“What are you doing?” Caroline asked.
“I’m going to use my ninja training to jump down and land lightly on the loading dock,” I said. “And then I go around to the front of the hotel, walk in like someone who knows she has a perfect right to be here, and hurry back up to the room so I can unlock the sliding glass door from the inside.”
“Use your ninja super-speed while you’re at it, dearie,” Caroline said.
“I’ll try.” By this time, I was dangling from the bottom of the railing, arms stretched as far as they would go. The gap between my feet and the concrete seemed to be at least the length of a football field, Maybe two football fields. “If by some chance I kill myself, is there any chance you could manage to call 911? Just tell them to come and pick up the dead ninja on the loading dock.”
“I’ll tell them two dead ninjas,” Caroline said. “Because if you go splat, I don’t think I can hold on until they get here.”
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and let go.
Chapter 28
“Meg? Are you all right? Speak to me!”
Easier said than done. I’d dropped and rolled with beautiful form—my old martial arts teacher would have been proud of me. Unfortunately, while rolling, I’d managed to hit my solar plexus on something—probably my own knee—and I didn’t have enough breath to answer her. And her back was to me, and she couldn’t turn around without falling off the ledge.
“I’m fine,” I croaked.
Apparently she didn’t hear me.
“Help! Help!” she began shouting.
“Ssshhh,” I hissed, as loudly as I could. The hissing sound carried only slightly better than my feeble croaks.
“Meg?”
I was near a garbage can. I tapped out “shave and a haircut—two bits” on it with one foot.
“Lost your breath?”
I kicked the can twice. Then I staggered to my feet.
“Fetching help!” I wheezed. I checked the loading dock doors, but unfortunately they were all locked, so I stumbled off to circumnavigate the hotel.
By the time I reached the front door, I’d gotten my wind back, and my stomach had mostly stopped hurting. I nodded graciously to the doorman as he let me in. If he was puzzled that he’d now let me into the hotel twice without letting me out in between, his calm face didn’t show it.
The two businessmen were still by the fireplace—or two others remarkably like them had taken their place. Leonard Fisher was sitting at a table in the lobby bar with a glass and a Perrier bottle on his table, reading some papers. I wasn’t sure my imitation of someone with a good reason to be at the Inn would hold up nearly as well if I had to talk to him, so I was relieved when I made it through the lobby without attracting his notice. I picked up the pace once I got into the corridor to the Annex, ran up the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator, and sprinted down the hall to 212.
“What took you so damn long?” Caroline said when I opened the sliding glass door.
“Nice to see you, too,” I said.
It took a while to get her inside the room. I finally leaned out and grabbed the back of her blouse and the waist of her pants so I could haul her in.
“Just stop gripping the railing,” I ordered. “I’ve got you now.”
“I’m not sure I can,” she said. “I think my hands are paralyzed.”
“Hurry up, or I’m going to lose my grip on you.”
That worked. She let go so suddenly that we both landed in a heap on the floor inside the door. I managed to roll out from under her and lay back on the floor panting.
“Okay, they’re not paralyzed, but they have gone numb from holding on so tightly,” she said, grimacing as she slowly flexed her fingers. “And I’m dehydrated as hell. I’ll be lucky if I don’t have heatstroke.”
“You want me to call Dad?” I said. “I could take you over to have him look at you.”
“Maybe later,” she said. “Follow me.”
I was expecting her to lead the way to our next burglary target, but she charted an unerring course to the lobby bar. Leonard Fisher was still there, nursing his Perrier. We nodded at each other. Caroline and I took a table as far from him as possible, and a waiter scurried up.
“How may I help you, ladies?” he asked.
“A pitcher of water,” I said.
“I’ll have a martini,” Caroline gasped.
“If you really are worried about dehydration, you should have some water,” I said.
“Make it a double,” Caroline said. “And a pitcher of water for me, too.”
“Good,” I said. “And you should drink the water first.”
“Drink it?” Caroline snorted. “I plan to pour it over my head.”
The waiter bowed and disappeared.
“I don’t think I can go on,” Caroline said.
“Of course you can.” I wanted to ask “Go on with what?” Surely our adventure hadn’t soured her on life.
“No, I can’t. We’ll have to finish this another day.”
I was relieved. Apparently she was only giving up on today’s plans. I glanced at my watch. Almost noon. Amazing how time-consuming a life of crime could be.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I think we got the most important burgling done. I doubt if the Evil Lender’s execs keep many sensitive documents in their rooms.”
The waiter returned. He set Caroline’s martini in front of her, and put a pitcher of ice water and a tumbler of ice on my side of the table. Then he set a second pitcher, this one without ice, at Caroline’s elbow, along with a thick white bath towel, a matching washcloth, and a large porcelain bowl. Then he bowed and slipped away. Much as I railed against the Inn’s inflated prices, I couldn’t fault their notion of service.